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» Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE   » Operations   » Digital Cinema Forum   » TI to do 4K: Cinemark to get the new projectors (Page 4)

 
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Author Topic: TI to do 4K: Cinemark to get the new projectors
Sam D. Chavez
Film God

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- posted 06-23-2009 02:34 AM      Profile for Sam D. Chavez   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message       Edit/Delete Post 
It would not characterize Ioan's announcement as vaporware for the following reasons.

Dolby started serious work on SR.D since about 1987 as I recall.

Ray Dolby was still finishing SR so the company could not put the pedal to the metal as it were, but a very good team was assembled for the project. While we were waiting for the green light, we did the bar code automation project as well working out the location and size of the bits on film, a bit reduction algorithm, as well as a reader.

One of my roles in this was to gather a number of 35mm penthouses so we could decide on the best approach quickly. The prototype reader had bits off my Simplex XL penthouse.

Dolby's announcement, coupled with CDS's mishaps, did have the desired the effect of slowing down the pace. Dolby had a reputation for delivering on promises so the announcement had credibility.

Perhaps TI's announcement will have the same effect and for the same reason, credibility.

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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."

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- posted 06-23-2009 12:30 PM      Profile for Bobby Henderson   Email Bobby Henderson   Send New Private Message       Edit/Delete Post 
Dolby had the AC2 compression system in use in early 1991. AC3 wasn't done yet. The first DD test system was used at the end of 1991 on the 6th Star Trek movie. The system didn't get introduced to theaters until June of 1992. The main reason why Dolby chose to announce Dolby Digital in March of 1991 was to steal the spotlight away from CDS and its first advertised 35mm CDS release (which was The Doors). If CDS' system hadn't been a threat Dolby would have held off on the announcement until the end of 1991 or early 1992.

TI has already been making DLP chips for more than a decade. The "enhanced 4K" DLP chip they're planning to sell may not exist yet and there is still a big question on whether it really is 4K. It's a vaporware product and the only motive for announcing it now is to attempt to keep Sony and its now available 4K system at bay.

As far as credibility goes, I'd like to see technical disclosure from Texas Instruments about the native resolution of their enhanced 4K DLP chip. Is it really 4K?

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Julio Roberto
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- posted 06-23-2009 01:03 PM      Profile for Julio Roberto     Send New Private Message       Edit/Delete Post 
quote: Bobby Henderson
As far as credibility goes, I'd like to see technical disclosure from Texas Instruments about the native resolution of their enhanced 4K DLP chip. Is it really 4K?
The way I always go about these type of things is:

-If it was truly 4K, in no more than a few weeks the technical details would certainly be advertised or answered in the press somewhere. Heck, I would personally phone Christie and ask them if I have to. You wouldn't want to have a techonological feat like a 4K DLP chip for (around) the price/size of current 2K system and NOT advertise it left-and-right.

If there is a cloud of "mystery", carefully chosen words (like "effective resolution" or "capable resolution", etc) instead of just plain-old "native resolution", etc .... then, there is something fishy there.

The only valid answer from TI is: what's the pixel count of your 4K chips? Answer: 4096x2160. Any other answer would smell like [bs] is going on.

You can claim that your wobbulated 2K chips can put a 4K pixel count on the screen. But it CAN'T put them all at the same time, obviously. And putting 2K and then another 2K and then another 2K and then the last 2K is not the same as putting 4K.

It would be weird if we started a new era of .... INTERLACED! D-Cinema [dlp]

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David Stambaugh
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- posted 06-23-2009 01:04 PM      Profile for David Stambaugh   Author's Homepage   Email David Stambaugh   Send New Private Message       Edit/Delete Post 
I emailed TI's DLP group last week with the question "Is it 4K, or is it 2K + Wobulation = 4K?"

Oddly, they have not responded. [Confused] [Wink]

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Lyle Romer
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- posted 06-23-2009 01:17 PM      Profile for Lyle Romer   Email Lyle Romer   Send New Private Message       Edit/Delete Post 
There are people on the AVS (I think) forum claiming it is a true 4k chip at 1.2" and that the info came from a contact at Barco.

I'd still take it with a grain of salt since it is only a message board post with unnamed sources. One comment in the thread was that it's been in the works for a while.

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Sam D. Chavez
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- posted 06-23-2009 05:00 PM      Profile for Sam D. Chavez   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message       Edit/Delete Post 
I sat next to the TI exec for cinema at the first screening of footage from "Avatar" three hours ago at Cine Expo. FWIW, he says it's is "genuine" 4K and will be done on the 1.2 chip only. As to time to first delivery of chips, I did not ask.

Now as to Bobby's last points. Reciting when AC-2, AC-3, and what date a film released is a simple matter of record and I'll take your word for it as I no longer remember such minutia, claiming to know the motive why Dolby Labs chose a particular date to make an announcement or seeming to claim malice or bad will as a fact on Dolby's part is another.

Did you work for CDS, or someone directly involved with film digital sound? If you do not have direct knowledge of this, you should maybe soften your writing style. If you do, lay it out there.

TI and Dolby Labs have pretty good historical records of backing up their claims in the past and this was my main point.

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Mark Gulbrandsen
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- posted 06-23-2009 05:21 PM      Profile for Mark Gulbrandsen   Email Mark Gulbrandsen   Send New Private Message       Edit/Delete Post 
Sam, To ad to the credibility I also remember Ioan Allen stating a date that it would be installed in theaters in large cities for trials and it was something like jsut 6 to 9 months down the road from his Showest speech... I can bet that you installed some of that gear yourself!

quote: David Stambaugh
I emailed TI's DLP group last week with the question "Is it 4K, or is it 2K + Wobulation = 4K?"
I thought they might be using spatial shift on the pixels to hide the latticework between the pixels. This is very commonly done in broadcast television cameras to improve resolution... which it does.

I think Sam's post is all I need though. I doubt the TI guy is going to try to pull the wool over anyone's eyes. T.I. is a first class corporation and always have produced top notch semiconductors. It's obvious though that even alot of people at T.I. didn't know about this either... may have been why there is just a supposed skelton crew in 2K DLP... they all left and went somewhere else to do 4K to keep it a corporate secret. This is also very common within companies.

ONe thing is for sure... it's going to be dam expensive!!

Mark

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David Stambaugh
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- posted 06-23-2009 05:23 PM      Profile for David Stambaugh   Author's Homepage   Email David Stambaugh   Send New Private Message       Edit/Delete Post 
Sometimes opinion, conjecture, and historical facts get all twisted up in knots. Only a few current or former Dolby employees know for sure what was going on there in the early days of digital sound. The rest of us are left to guess what occurred.

The more I think about the 4K DLP thing, the more convinced I am that it has to be real 4K. Anything less than that from TI and its partners, especially Christie, would put their system at a severe marketing disadvantage, unless it has some other "hook" that trumps real 4K.

That is my opinion. [Big Grin]

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Mark Gulbrandsen
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- posted 06-23-2009 05:26 PM      Profile for Mark Gulbrandsen   Email Mark Gulbrandsen   Send New Private Message       Edit/Delete Post 
quote: David Stambaugh
Anything less than that from TI and its partners, especially Christie, would put their system at a severe marketing disadvantage, unless it has some other "hook" that trumps real 4K.
That may already be what will happen. The price of 2K gear has to come way way down into say the 30K dollar range for a complete booth and this T.I. 4K gear has to be priced accordingly with Sony's 4K gear. I doubt we'll see that happen. I still say it's going to be out of range for even the large chains to buy into on much of a scale. I can bet that Imax will be the forst to use them though...

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David Stambaugh
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- posted 06-23-2009 05:35 PM      Profile for David Stambaugh   Author's Homepage   Email David Stambaugh   Send New Private Message       Edit/Delete Post 
Pure Conjecture:

TI must have 4K running in a lab somewhere. When AMC & Regal announced they were going with Sony, there were probably frantic meetings and conference calls between TI, Christie, Cinemark, and other interested parties, in which TI was told to either commit to 4K, or watch their 2K business slide into oblivion. Kind of like Hey TI, either shit or get off the pot!

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Sam D. Chavez
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- posted 06-23-2009 05:36 PM      Profile for Sam D. Chavez   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message       Edit/Delete Post 
There is conjecture, opinion, speculation etc, but one thought going around the show is that at the end of the day, because of price, there will be one screen of 4K and the rest 2K (kind of like 70mm) in years past.

Wouldn't that be a bit of irony?

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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."

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- posted 06-23-2009 07:14 PM      Profile for Bobby Henderson   Email Bobby Henderson   Send New Private Message       Edit/Delete Post 
The situation sounds a little like 70mm versus 35mm, but there is some big differences.

A lot of multiplex sites (Regal, AMC, Cinemark and others) will have 4K installed in every auditorium -something 70mm never had on any large scale.

Prices between 2K and 4K prints shouldn't be any different either, although the JPEG2000 compression levels on 4K resolution virtual prints may run significantly higher than 2K. Doesn't DCI specs still dictate a 250 million bit per second maximum even for 4K content? The major cost differences between 70mm and 35mm prints kept 70mm prints out of a lot of 70mm equipped theaters.

Setting up a 4K movie shouldn't be any different in principal than setting up a 2K movie playlist. Perhaps it may take longer to download the movie via satellite or have the server ingest the movie from a portable hard drive. But not if the movie has higher levels of data compression to make up for the difference. More work went into setting up to show a 70mm mag striped print. Not so much for 70mm DTS.

4K is really where digital projection needs to be in order to be a credible replacement for 35mm film projectors. 4K isn't a replacement for 70mm. Still, Hollywood has to get on the ball in terms of generating native 4K digital intermediates and CGI. Otherwise any advertising of "4K" for a movie will likely be a bit phony since the projector is really just blowing up a 2K movie file. That would be a little like all those 1.85:1 movies in the 1980s using 70mm prints for 6-track Dolby audio.

If TI's new DLP chip is truly native 4K then that certainly is good news for Texas Instruments. It would mean the company had to have managed radically reducing the size of DLP chip parts. 4K DLP chips for movie theaters is only part of the equation, and not the most profitable part either.

The real benefit with an updated DLP manufacturing process is being able to produce DLP chips for computer projectors and home theater projectors at much smaller sizes and higher resolution levels. TI may be able to breathe new life into that market.

I don't think there is currently any DLP-based projectors with 1080p native resolution selling for any less than $2000 -and that's a single chip solution with some serious compromises. A 3-chip system would cost a lot more money. Most of the low cost DLP projectors I see in computing catalogs have low resolutions like 800 X 600 or 1024 X 768.

With a 1080p DLP chip produced at only 25% of its former size some huge cost savings could be possible. 3-chip DLP 1080p home theater projectors might get a lot more popular for home theaters if some models came in under $5000 or $2500 price points. More offices and classrooms might jump on 1080p DLP single chip projectors if they could be had for under $1000.

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Steve Guttag
We forgot the crackers Gromit!!!

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- posted 06-23-2009 07:21 PM      Profile for Steve Guttag   Email Steve Guttag   Send New Private Message       Edit/Delete Post 
While I certainly have no ill will nor ill-wish TI anything...I just don't believe it (and will be the first to admit if I'm wrong). The potential $$$ from 4K or anything DLP at this point just don't justify spending penny one.

Once DCinema is the predominate...what are the yearly sales of chips really going to be to handle new builds and repairs? It can't support itself. If 4K DLP is like 70mm (one screen per large complex...or maybe two)...then that potential payback is even smaller.

The DLP folks didn't go into a secret place to develop 4K...they were laid-off.

I'm standing behind my only sure thing when it comes to movies and movie theatres...believe it when you see it.

As for Dolby...I recall putting in a very pricey system into the Uptown...DA10 with a pair of Cat 699 readers...it was around $20K for everything, if I recall correctly...it was in time for The Fugitive...or 1993. It definitely was not the first system installed anywhere but it was also one of the first in the DC-Metro area and Dolby made a deal to Cineplex to get it done. The Uptown carried a bit of prestige that would translate to other exhibitors.

Steve

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Mark Gulbrandsen
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- posted 06-23-2009 10:20 PM      Profile for Mark Gulbrandsen   Email Mark Gulbrandsen   Send New Private Message       Edit/Delete Post 
quote: Steve Guttag
The potential $$$ from 4K or anything DLP at this point just don't justify spending penny one.
Well, I bet you'd have a hard time convincing Christie, BARCO, and NEC of that. These three companies have way too much invested to be over run by the folks at Sony. One can pretty much assume they put the vice on T.I. and clamped it down really hard. For all we know these three companies may have financed it...

As for layoffs it just doesn't make sense! Why lay off an entire team familiar with the scientific and production process of DLP and then hire and put others to work on the same thing just to add more pixels. Give me a break... companies can be and are typically very secretive about big developments which this indeed is. So secretive that other dummy divisions are sometimes created to put up a smoke screen... You may have been fooled Steve obviously unbeknownst to yourself into thinking and posting exactly what T.I. was wanting!!! You were probably one of the smoke screens.

Mark

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Bobby Henderson
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- posted 06-23-2009 11:22 PM      Profile for Bobby Henderson   Email Bobby Henderson   Send New Private Message       Edit/Delete Post 
quote:
As for layoffs it just doesn't make sense!
Sorry, but Steve is correct.

Texas Instruments: DLP on the Ropes

quote: Eric A. Taub, New York Times
January 26, 2009, 7:31 pm
Texas Instruments: DLP on the Ropes
By Eric A. Taub

Texas Instruments announced across-the-board losses and employee layoffs on Monday. One of the areas hardest hit was the division that creates the DLP technology used in most rear-projection TVs. Revenue in that group, which also includes calculators and microprocessors, dropped 30 percent and profit dropped 70 percent.

Within the last few months, several DLP division executives, seeing the writing on the wall, have left TI. TI said it would lay off 1,800 people across divisions and accept voluntary retirements from 1,600 more.

Given the state of the rear-projection business, the results are not surprising. The company had already ceded ground to flat-panel TV technology in every size below 55 inches, and with new, more efficient LCD manufacturing facilities opening in about two years, it’s likely that except for the very biggest supersize TVs and front projectors, everyone will be buying a flat TV using either LCD or plasma technology.

The company says it will concentrate on its 3D DLP TV work but the reality is that consumers have shown they prefer thin flat-panel sets, not the more bulky rear projection models that require one to sit just so to see the best picture.

I suspect that in the not-too-distant future, DLP will be little but a memory, a transitional technology that showed early adopters how good an HDTV image could be, and now has become.
As to some of the technology developments still going on at TI, perhaps the development of the 4K DLP cinema chip is an offshoot of the new TI Pico DLP technology.

TI Pico Projectors

quote: Laura Jane, Engadget
We love pico projectors, we love phones -- so the combo pack known as the Samsung Show stopped us in our tracks when we first spied it at CES. Well, Texas Instruments, makers of the DLP projector chip that runs the Show, if you will, have just announced the second generation DLP chip which is -- you guessed it -- smaller! The second-gen chip is about 20 percent smaller and thinner in fact, and it boasts the ability to display WVGA resolution (the previous model has HVGA resolution), all while delivering a brighter display! TI's press specifically mentions mobile phones, so don't be surprised if the Show doesn't have a host of competitors to deal with any day now. Texas Instruments is on hand at MWC, and their press conference is tonight, so we'll be watching, magnifying glass in hand, to see what else they have in store for us.

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